Reporting current affairs concerning Sweden, Israel and the Jews, making underreported issues available for the non-Swedish speaking world.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Carl Bildt’s Barking Hypocrisy

An exemplar of the same “do as I say, not as I do” principle is Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt (Moderate Party).We have already shown that Bildt criticizes Israel for humanitarian abuses—such as building homes for Jews in the nation’s capital. Yet Bildt is closely linked to Swedish oil company Lundin. Lundin’s operations in Sudan were greatly aided by the local government’s massacre of inconvenient rebel forces operating near drill sites.

As readers may recall, Sweden is the host country for the WikiLeaks database, and also plays host to pirate websites for the downloading of copyrighted materials.Sweden does this in the name of freedom of the press and information. Hypocritically, Sweden’s monolithic TT wire service routinely edits out facts that contradict left-wing positions as we wrote here.

In keeping with the general spirit of hypocrisy, Sweden had no problem hosting Wikileaks’ servers—but Bildt refuses to respond about how he and fellow moderate Tobias Billström were characterized in Wikileaks material. In the Wikileaks cables of April 2009 Bildt was summed up by American diplomatic personnel as, “Carl Bildt: Medium Size Dog with Big Dog Attitude”.

The dispatch explains the big-for britches attitude further:

-“He is widely respected in Sweden as an elder statesman…But he…has limited political skills (often seen as a haughty member of the nobility, not the image which Reinfeldt and the new Moderates seek to project).”

On the Iranian front, Bildt is the only EU foreign minister to oppose sanctions against Iran. While the leftist media position is that sanctions have a detrimental effect on Iranian citizens, (i.e. human rights issues) the cables give the assessment that:

-“For economicreasons, Sweden is generally skeptical about the effectiveness of sanctions and in particular with Iran, where Ericsson and Volvo Trucks, among other Swedish companies, have significant exports [italics mine].”

Of course in public, Bildt offers cryptic meaninglessness, as in this statement he gave to an al-Arabia journalist regarding Swedish negotiating policy vis-à-vis Iran:

-“I think that what has been demonstrated, if we didn’t know it before, is that the supreme authority in Iran is the supreme leader, to which extent that has implications for the way in which we conduct talks remains to be seen. But that is an obvious fact.”

To which the reasonable response would be…Whatever.

Bildt also expressed his opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process:

-“He has focused his public remarks on humanitarian issues, urging that the Gaza border crossings be opened immediately. POL Director Lyrvall [Bildt’s flunky, Björn Lyrvall, Director-General for Political Affairs] recently stressed to us that the international community cannot ignore Hamas; ‘Fatah-only elections would mean the end of the Palestinian state.’"

Followers of this blog know that border crossings are controlled by Israel for one reason and one reason only: the prevention of arms smuggling. Nonetheless, Gaza manages to receive arms and other goods via tunnels under its other closed border with Egypt.This is in addition to the tons of aid trucked in regularly by Israel. There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, except for the crisis of living under Hamas totalitarianism.

As far as the elections statement goes, it would be more accurate to say “Hamas-inclusive elections will mean the end of a Fatah state”, including Hamas’ execution of over one hundred Fatah members. Guess that does make Hamas hard to ignore—for the Gaza public. Sweden seems to overlook these “details”.

The final icing on the hypocrisy cake is that while crying humanitarian abuse against Israel, as far back as 2007, Bildt and Billström were (and still are) trying to limit actual humanitarian refugees from reaching or staying in Sweden. This was proved in the recent deportation of Iraqi Christians back to terror conditions for Christians in Iraq.

Mr. Bildt may have a superior opinion of himself, but it’s certainly not deserved.